Cripping active travel futures: how are disabled people represented and included in planning for fair and inclusive mobility?

Active travel affords many personal and societal benefits, but opportunities to walk, wheel and cycle are not afforded equally. Barriers to active travel play a significant role in the disabling process for people with impairments, including being able to access vital healthcare services, execute caring responsibilities, and get and stay in employment.

Similarly, disabled people who wish to participate often find that the impetus is upon themselves to highlight and resolve accessibility problems, creating a further burden and potentially greater symbolic exclusion. The empirical focus is on North East England, the region with the highest number of disabled people in England. Through two ethnographic case studies and interviews with activists and policymakers the project seeks a route to impact change in active travel planning by centralising the needs of disabled people. It asks how the practices of active

travel practitioners can centralise disability in the future? The research is informed by past research into disability and the built environment and will contribute to critical access studies among other theories of disability. It will take an interpretivist approach to policy analysis, deploying ethnographic and interview methodologies to explore whether and how disabled people are: first, represented and included in active travel planning processes and second, how they are subsequently represented in policy and funding schemes.

Through prolonged engagement with active travel practitioners the research will thus contribute to understandings of how to achieve more equitable active travel planning.